distrust and hostility when newcomers come in.’7
The NF performed abysmally in the 1979 general election, despite standing a record number of candidates. As a result Tyndall was ousted from the leadership by his erstwhile ally Martin Webster. Supporting Webster in this was Griffin, now part of a group of young activists who thought the NF needed to tailor its appeal more to alienated, urban working-class youth. They were known as the ‘Strasserites’.
Attacking the free-market values of the Thatcher Government and calling for social security that guaranteed a basic standard of living – so long as you were white and British – the Strasserites took their name from two brothers who had been members of the German Nazi Party. Gregor and Otto Strasser were ‘left-wing’ Nazis who purported to side with workers against big business but rejected Communism as an anti-German plot. Griffin and other young NF members advocated Strasserite ideas through Nationalism Today, a magazine established as a counter to the official party journals in 1979.
One article, headlined ‘We Are Not Marxists – We Are Not Capitalists’, promised ‘radical ideological development’ of the NF’s programme:
We reject the Marxist belief that human consciousness and social structures have their ultimate origins in changing economic relations and that a future change in economic relations will lead to a new human type and to a new society free from antagonism of any kind. We reject the Capitalist prescription that political man must make way for economic man and that our decisions, personal as well as political, should be made on economic grounds; that we should live in order to work, rather than work in order to live.8
Did this make the NF Strasserites ‘left-wing’? The short answer is no, since racial purity and private property took precedence over any egalitarian commitment. They combined the Strassers’ ideas with the creed of Distributism, an economic theory that grew from a tradition of English radical right-wing thought in the early twentieth century. It held that the political elite acted only in the interests of an international ‘plutocracy’ and that the solution lay in an equal distribution of private property among the national community. These ideas were first explored by the journalist Hilaire Belloc in The Party System (1911), which argued that both Liberal and Tory parliamentary front benches had more in common with one another – serving the interests of big business – than with their own membership. The Servile State (1912) argued that state welfare provision would only end up enslaving the working class.
After the First World War, Belloc’s ideas were taken up and shaped into the creed of Distributism by his friend G.K. Chesterton. It looked back to a heavily idealized medieval Christian Europe of peasants, where craftsmen and merchants were organized into guilds that set prices and regulated competition. According to Chesterton, the advent of capitalism, which was unstable and put wealth in the hands of a few, only undermined this. He argued that every English family should own its own means of production, as a guarantee of economic independence and liberty.9
For the National Front Strasserites, Distributism conveniently provided a bridge between mainstream political thought and their own racism. Not only did it give a ‘patriotic’ gloss to their ideas, but Chesterton’s distrust of Bolshevism and ‘cosmopolitan finance’ had at times shaded into anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Such anti-Semitism had always been a feature of far-right doctrine in the UK, and the Strasserites were no exception. Capitalism and ‘national independence’ could not coexist, they argued; the sovereignty of the nation state must be protected from the ‘Money Power’. During one of our interviews, Griffin readily admitted to the anti-Semitic nature of the Strasserite programme: ‘Our position . . . was the leftist SA10 position where they happily allied themselves with the Communists and said well as regards the banks we’ll shoot the Jewish ones and you shoot the rest.’ He laughed. ‘Fairly pragmatic.’
Past issues of Nationalism Today are full of anti-Semitic caricatures: in one, a cigar-smoking, hook-nosed businessman is blamed for acid rain in an illustration accompanying an article titled ‘Capitalism Poisons Europe’.11 Numerous articles about ‘black crime’ (a favourite 1970s NF propaganda theme) appear along with adverts for The Turner Diaries, a novel by the American white supremacist William Luther Pierce in which he imagines a violent revolution and ensuing race war in the United States. The novel has inspired neo-Nazis around the world – most notably Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in April 1995.
The day-to-day reality of the National Front in the 1980s was more prosaic. It had been smashed as a serious political force, while Webster continued to recruit the most thuggish elements to its cause. Its propaganda was based on crude racism and little else. Under Webster’s direction, the Young National Front launched a youth magazine, Bulldog, aimed at the skinhead subculture and edited by Pearce, who spent two spells in prison for incitement to racial hatred as a result. It also established a music venture, White Noise, which promoted ‘white power’ punk rock and was centred on the racist skinhead band Skrewdriver. Griffin organized festivals for Skrewdriver and other bands on his parents’ land in Suffolk. Webster’s leadership lasted until 1983, before he too was forced out of the National Front – by the Strasserites. This heralded yet another ideological twist.
Run by a couple of well-spoken graduates named Nick and Michael, on the face of it Heritage Tours seemed much like any other company offering to take tourists on trips around London’s landmarks during the mid-1980s. But away from the day job, the ‘guides’ were committed racial nationalists, working to formulate a political creed that combined ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, fascist mysticism and ideas about building a social movement derived in part from Marxist philosophy.
Heritage Tours was run from the central London flat of Michael Walker – one of several money-making schemes Griffin took part in to fund his political activities. Walker, a former regional organizer of the NF and a talented linguist, was convinced that the British far right lacked theory. He developed an interest in ideas circulating among a group of intellectuals within the French far-right Front National, associated with the Groupement de recherches et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (the Research and Study Group for European Civilization) or GRECE. Led by the philosopher Alain de Benoist, GRECE attacked what it saw as the soulless nature of consumer capitalism. Liberal, multiracial America was seen as the worst embodiment of this phenomenon, against which de Benoist advocated a revival of European national cultures. Rather than arguing for the superiority of one race over another, he maintained the issue was one of difference: keeping races and cultures separate would lead to a national spiritual rebirth and end the alienation of contemporary life.12
De Benoist also took ideas about strategy from the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. Drawing on Gramsci’s ‘war of position’ theory, he argued that the far right needed to achieve cultural hegemony before it could gain political power, pushing key ideas and values among groups of influential people. As the GRECE journal Eléments explained, ‘We want to attract those few thousand people who make a country tick. A few thousand is not many in absolute terms, but a few thousand of such importance, sharing the same thoughts and methods, represent the potential for revolution.’13
Meanwhile, Heritage Tours became the subject of a press exposé thanks to the involvement of Roberto Fiore, a friend of Griffin’s.14 Only a few months older than Griffin, he had fled to London from Italy with the help of the League of St George, a clandestine far-right network that provided ‘safe houses’ for neo-Nazis on the run. Fiore, despite maintaining his innocence, was wanted by Italian police because of his association with a terrorist group, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei), which had bombed a Bologna train station in 1980, killing eighty-five people.
Fiore was part of a new generation of Italian fascists who rejected parliamentary politics, looking instead to the ideas of the Sicilian mystic philosopher Julius Evola (1898–1974). Like de Benoist, Evola had criticized the decadence of capitalist society, but for him, spiritual rebirth would be achieved by an elite warrior caste. Fiore had used Evola’s ideas to formulate a creed
